| Author |
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707
| | Posted on Saturday, May 12, 2001 - 2:23 pm: | 
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One evening, several years ago, while "monitoring skip :-)" from Australia and the South Pacific, I listened to a series of QSOs from several stations scattered around the west coast, Oklahoma, and Oregon, over a period of about 30 minutes. They were talking to a guy who claimed to be on an Air Force cargo flight from Nevada to Missouri, and using the onboard HF rig to "shoot skip" He claimed he did this "all the time" on these flights to combat boredom. This occured on 27.575, LSB. I could hear this "Air Force Guy" quite nicely(s30), and heard the other stations also giving him good signal reports, as well as "The Air Force Guy"(used handle "Flying Bus") giving reports to stations I couldn't hear, mentioning Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. The Local DX Nuts around me were having a heyday, and we even "tracked" the flight with our beam antennas as he flew over N Oklahoma and S Kansas. Subsequently, about two months later, two local DX operators I knew of got pink slipped from the FCC, citing those communications and dtg. They had fallen for the ruse and actually given their mailing addresses to get a card from this guy. One of them, who failed to cease and hide his stuff, had all of his equipment confiscated and fined a month later. Air Force Guy my A**!!! |
Copper_Fan
| | Posted on Saturday, May 12, 2001 - 5:28 pm: |
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i thought it was just as illegal even for the FCC to talk on those channels even if it was for finding illegal operators???? |
David Paul
| | Posted on Sunday, May 13, 2001 - 9:11 am: |
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The government or its agencies breaking a law that the average citizen must obey? THAT could never happen, could it?? :0
Seriously, the government is immune from its own laws...maybe not officially, but come on...
Especially if it is part of 'war on drugs', or 'combatting terrorism', forget it...they do what they want, and the courts don't seem to care that the Constitution prohibits most of what they do in the name of these two programs.... |
707
| | Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2001 - 7:03 pm: |
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If you will take a look at the bandplan for 11 meters, you will find that the FCC, Air Force and most other military and even some civil services have allocations there both above and below the CB band. Most specifically, 27.575 IS allocated to the Air Force and FCC, depending on which plan you look at. Most of the 25 MHz band is reserved for radio astronomy, so talking there is really not a good thing. Portions of the 26 MHz band are reserved for radio and tv STL and IFB use. I think if todays CBers were not as concerned with sounding BIG(big,big,big,big,echo ad infinitum), and POWERFUL on the dial as they were with simply owning a good antenna, we would have a lot more fun with DX, like back in the heyday(70s)when there were MANY more operators on band than now, but not as many linears, and a guy could talk DX with stock power on stock channels. Remember, DXing is not a one way street. You gotta be able to hear as well as talk to make those contacts. Nuff Said. |
davidpaul
| | Posted on Thursday, May 17, 2001 - 8:45 pm: |
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That must have been fun when it was like that.
I just today found a list of government 11 meter allocations that confirms what you were saying, 707. I knew that 27.540-28.000 was a US government band, so I kindof jumped the gun with my post...
I think that the Air Force guy might very well have been just that...That FCC enforcement was monitoring is plausible, too. I see it as the Air force guy was just fooling around, and he might have gotten in hot water too.
Then again, he might have been in cahoots with charley the whole time... |
707
| | Posted on Friday, May 18, 2001 - 5:00 pm: |
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Yes it was fun back in 1978, when I got my first sideband rig, an already old Midland 13-898b. I got my feet wet with DX on channel 16 LSB with stock output running either a Super Scanner or experimenting with a Starduster actually sitting on the ground, tripod style. Many contacts were made on a daily basis, and even with the same operators over and over, all over the country. Somewhere along the way, things changed, and by the next solar max, the band was awash with over-amplified, under-eared DXers who just wanted to be heard over the din but didn't really care to actually hold a conversation for more than 15 seconds. It seems that the export and modified radio boom took a lot of the load off of channels 36-40 now though, and it's getting back almost to the good old days there from time to time..if that idiot down the street, "WorldWide Six Pill" would just shut that TVI splatterbox with the 5/8 groundplane down long enough to quit swamping my frontend... :-) I'm backouuuuuut! |
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